John Kerry tells Wang Yi that China and US could use climate cooperation to redefine their troubled diplomatic relationship.
John Kerry, the United States’s envoy on climate, has held talks with China’s top diplomat in Beijing, calling for cooperation to tackle global warming and to redefine the troubled diplomatic relations between the world’s two biggest greenhouse gas emitters.
Kerry told Wang Yi on Tuesday that climate talks could provide a new start for US-China ties, which have been mired in disputes over issues including trade, technology and the self-governed island of Taiwan.
“Our hope is that this can be the beginning of a new definition of cooperation and capacity to resolve differences between us,” Kerry told Wang in the meeting at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People.
“We are very hopeful that this can be the beginning not just of a conversation between you and me and us on the climate track but that we can begin to change the broader relationship,” he said.
Kerry is the third senior US official in recent weeks to travel to China for meetings with their counterparts there, after Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
China broke off some mid- and high-level contacts with the administration of US President Joe Biden last year, including over climate issues, to show its anger with then-House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August. Beijing considers the democratically-governed island part of its territory.
Other problems have rocked relations since then, including the transit across the US of what Biden administration officials said was a Chinese spy balloon.
Kerry told Wang that Biden was “very committed to stability within this relationship, but also to achieve efforts together that can make a significant difference to the world”.
“From experience, if we work at it we can find the path again in ways that resolve these challenges,” Kerry said. “The world is really looking to us for that leadership, particularly on the climate issue.”
For his part, Wang described Kerry as “my old friend”, saying they have “worked together to solve a series of problems between both sides”.
He praised Kerry and his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenzhua, for their “hard work” during the 12 hours of talks they held in a Beijing Hotel on Monday.
US officials have declined to comment on the Kerry-Xie discussions. Beijing said after the talks that “climate change is a common challenge faced by all mankind”.
China would “exchange views with the United States on issues related to climate change, and work together to meet challenges and improve the wellbeing of current and future generations”, foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said.
As the leading emitter of the greenhouse gases driving climate change, China has pledged to ensure its carbon emissions peak by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. The Biden administration aims to decarbonise the US economy by 2050.
While Kerry has sought to ring-fence climate issues from wider diplomatic disputes, China has said that cooperation on global warming could not be separated from broader concerns.
In a commentary published on Sunday, the Xinhua state news agency said recent US-China official interactions are a “good sign for preventing further miscalculations, and steering bilateral relations back on track”. But it added that Beijing was seeking more concessions on the political side – something the US has said it will not provide.
“It is especially true for the White House to bear in mind that seeking to compartmentalize cooperation with – or competition and suppression against – China in bilateral ties is simply unrealistic in practice and unacceptable for Beijing,” Xinhua said.
“For China-US cooperation to be healthy and sustainable, bilateral ties must be treated as a whole,” it said.
Scorching weather gripped three continents on Sunday, whipping up wildfires and threatening to topple temperature records.
In the Vatican, 15,000 people braved sweltering temperatures to hear Pope Francis lead prayer, using parasols and fans to keep cool.
In Japan, authorities issued heatstroke alerts to tens of millions of people in 20 of its 47 prefectures as near-record high temperatures scorched large areas and torrential rain pummelled other regions.
National broadcaster NHK warned the heat was life-threatening, with the capital and other places recording nearly 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).
Japan’s highest temperature ever – 41.1C (106F) first recorded in Kumagaya city in 2018 – could be beaten, according to the meteorological agency.
Some places experienced their highest temperatures in more than four decades on Sunday, including Hirono town in Fukushima prefecture with 37.3C (99.1F).
Meanwhile, the US National Weather Service warned a “widespread and oppressive” heatwave in southern and western states was expected to peak, with more than 80 million people affected by excessive heat warnings or heat advisories on Sunday.
Southern California is fighting numerous wildfires, including one in Riverside County that has burned more than 7,500 acres (3,000 hectares) and prompted evacuation orders.
In Europe, Italians were warned to prepare for “the most intense heatwave of the summer and also one of the most intense of all time”.
Predictions of historic highs in the coming days led the health ministry to sound a red alert for 16 cities, including Rome, Bologna and Florence.
Temperatures are likely to hit 40C (104F) in Rome by Monday and rise on Tuesday, smashing the record of 40.5C (104.9F) set in August 2007.
Meanwhile, at least 4,000 people have been evacuated due to a forest fire on the island of La Palma in Spain.
The ongoing blaze, which started on July 14, has so far devastated more than 5,000 hectares (12,355 acres) of woodland.
With wildfire season under way in the United States, the federal government is facing a potential exodus of wildland firefighters over a major pay cut that could go into effect in a few months.
Funding in President Joe Biden’s 2021 infrastructure law gave a temporary pay boost to thousands of firefighters on the climate front lines – but the money is set to run out in the coming months, which could push many to quit, experts warned.
“I honestly think at least a third could go within a matter of months,” said Steve Lenkart, executive director of the National Federation of Federal Employees union.
“It would be really devastating for the country.”
The US Forest Service (USFS) has about 10,775 wildland firefighters – 95 percent of its goal of 11,300 for 2023 – and the Department of the Interior, which manages federal and tribal lands, has more than 5,400 such personnel, the latest official data showed.
While total figures are difficult to pin down, the federal government is estimated to be the largest employer of career wildland firefighters in the US.
Any reduction, though, would compound a growing labour and climate crisis as tenured firefighters depart federal agencies for other jobs and climate change fuels hotter, drier conditions that increase the risk of out-of-control blazes.
Firefighters ‘still fed up’
Rachel Granberg, a wildland firefighter based in Washington state with eight years of experience, has already seen multiple colleagues leave their jobs in the past year or so.
“Even with the infrastructure money, they were still fed up – and one of the guys had been fighting fires for 19 years,” said the 37-year-old, whose statements reflected her own opinions and not those of her agency.
Although wildland firefighters welcomed the temporary pay rise, many have been labouring for years for salaries that they say do not adequately reflect the rigors of their work.
Biden took steps in 2021 to raise the minimum wage for federal wildland firefighters to $15 per hour after criticising the $13 per hour rate some had been making as “ridiculously low”.
The infrastructure law also included $600m for benefits for federal wildland firefighters, including temporary pay rises of up to $20,000 per year, or 50 percent of their base salary – whichever was lower.
However, federal officials estimated that those funds could run out by the end of September – when this federal budget year closes – or mid-October.
Jaelith Hall-Rivera, a deputy chief at the USFS, said the so-called “pay cliff”, coupled with budget cuts like those proposed in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, would be “pretty catastrophic” for the fire workforce.
“If we’re not able to get a change in pay status for our firefighters, … we’re [going to] see many of them go to higher-paying jobs where they can make a living wage,” she told senators at a recent hearing.
“We are hearing from our firefighting union that we could lose 30 to 50 percent of our firefighting workforce in the Forest Service. That would be devastating.”
Hall-Rivera testified at the same time Washington, DC, was dealing with poor air quality – a byproduct of record wildfires that have ravaged Canada this year.
A USFS spokesperson said the agriculture department, which the forest agency is part of, is committed to working with Congress to pass a permanent pay solution.
“Federal wildland firefighters must be offered competitive salaries and the pay and improved working conditions they so deserve,” the spokesperson said.
Lenkart said federal wildland firefighters are leaving not only for state and local fire service jobs, which can offer better pay and working conditions, but for other sectors, including construction and even fast food.
“Some are going to work, literally, at In-N-Out Burger because they can make 20 bucks an hour,” he said.
Cause for optimism?
Even with the pay cuts looming, some groups who recently met with congressional staff on Capitol Hill said they had the impression that lawmakers would be able to find a solution – but warned that the consequences of inaction would be dire.
In a bid to avert the cuts, a handful of senators introduced a federal bill this week that would increase firefighters’ base pay and provide additional pay and leave for firefighters responding to large wildfires.
“These brave men and women are our first line of defense against disaster, and they’ve earned the right to be fairly compensated for the dangerous work they do – including for adequate recovery time after a tough fire,” Senator Jon Tester of Montana, one of those supporting the bill, said in a statement.
Still, members of Congress typically spend much of the summer away from Washington, DC, leaving them scant time to strike a deal and get legislation enacted before the new budget year starts in October.
Absent action from Capitol Hill, “we’re going to continue … to see the best and brightest walk out the door,” said Luke Mayfield, president of the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters.
Brian Gold, a wildland firefighter in Colorado, said the pinch is really being felt at mid-level field leadership and lamented a significant brain and talent drain.
Some issues can be solved by increasing base pay, he said.
“But what’s really required is a holistic approach to the workforce problem, which is really burning out your labour force by requiring them to work massive amounts of overtime and be away from home for massive periods of time,” Gold added.
Working more, earning less
A recent study from the University of Washington and the USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station highlighted stark disparities in pay and benefits between federal wildland firefighters and state-level firefighters in four western states.
Federal compensation was on average 40.5 percent lower than that of state agencies – even though federal wildland firefighters spend an average of 12 more days per season on more complex fires, according to the research, which analysed Washington state, Oregon, California and Colorado.
“Federal firefighters are generally working more, earning less and [are] continuously exposed to hazard[s] and levels of responsibility that are just not commensurate with what they’re getting paid relative to some of these other agencies,” said Evan Pierce, co-author of the report.
— Grassroots Wildland Firefighters (@GrassrootsWFF) June 19, 2023
Similar to the new legislation, Biden’s 2024 budget proposal calls for extra firefighter benefits such as a permanent base-pay increase and “premium pay” to better compensate responders for the time they spend on fires. But these would have to win approval from Congress.
And even the 2024 proposed compensation package represents a gap of up to $8,184 in average salary between federal wildland firefighters and the leading state agency, the recent report found.
The USFS is aware that federal wages have not kept pace with state, local and private firefighting groups in some parts of the country, the agency’s spokesperson said.
Mayfield left the federal government several years ago after 18 years with the USFS “for an opportunity to have a livable and plannable income”, he said.
By the end of his USFS service, Mayfield said he had been dealing with issues linked to depression and suicidal thoughts and recalled that in conversations with more than half a dozen peers and mentors, almost everybody told him to go.
“One of my former superintendents, his quote to me was: ‘Leave, Luke. Do you want to be me?’” Mayfield said. “And my other buddy was like: ‘We spend all our time worrying about retirement. Nobody’s worried about living. Get out.’”
Canada has launched its first-ever national strategy to help communities adapt to increasingly severe weather caused by climate change.
Increased flooding, wildfires and melting permafrost are among the issues the government will seek to address under the strategy, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault explained in a press conference on Tuesday.
“We see more severe climate impact with each passing year, with each passing season – like this year’s rash of spring wildfires in BC [British Colombia], Alberta, Quebec, Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories,” Guilbeault said.
As of Tuesday, 7.8 million hectares (19 million acres) of land have burned this season, with the hottest months of the year still ahead. The fires have resulted in poor air quality in densely-populated areas across North America, with Montreal recording the worst air quality in the world on Sunday.
The fires, Guilbeault said, have not only been more intense but were also occurring “earlier in the year and in almost every province and territory at the same time”.
“This extreme weather is unprecedented,” he said.
The newly-announced strategy will run parallel to efforts to lower greenhouse emissions that exacerbate climate change. The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service reported on Tuesday that the recent wildfires have already released nearly 600 million tonnes of carbon dioxide — greater than Canada’s total emissions for any year on record.
The blazes are the latest natural disasters in Canada believed to be exacerbated by climate change.
Last year’s Hurricane Fiona battered Canada’s Atlantic provinces, becoming the most intense cyclone on record to strike the country. And in 2021, a so-called “atmospheric river” of rain triggered record-breaking floods in British Columbia. Earlier that year in the same province, a heat dome — a weather system that traps hot air — caused hundreds of deaths.
Meanwhile, thawing permafrost, which covers half of Canada, regularly “threatens homes, roads and important cultural sites as well as marine and coastal environments” and disproportionately affects Indigenous groups, according to the Canadian government.
By 2030, average annual losses from climate-change-related disasters are forecast to reach 15.4 billion Canadian dollars ($11.69bn), according to the federal government.
The Canadian Climate Institute also estimates that climate effects will slow Canada’s economic growth by 23.7 billion Canadian dollars ($18bn) annually by 2025, equal to 50 percent of projected gross domestic product growth.
Canada’s National Adaptation Strategy finally has buy-in from all levels of government – time to implement like our lives depend on it. A thought from @GreenpeaceCA: pic.twitter.com/IAd6CFWme9
“We need to address the real and significant costs of climate change that are already baked into our future,” Jonathan Wilkinson, the minister of natural resources, said at Tuesday’s news conference. “These costs are being held by Canadians and they will only increase as we move forward.”
The federal government outlined a series of goals, including improving health outcomes, protecting nature and biodiversity and building more resilient infrastructure. Since 2015, the Canadian government has pledged more than 10 billion Canadian dollars ($7.6bn) in “adaptation investment and disaster assistance”, Guilbeault said.
That included 2 billion Canadian dollars ($1.5bn) in funding commitments since 2022, some of which was earmarked for flood mapping and access to flood insurance.
The broad plan released on Tuesday would be refined based on the specific needs of communities across the country, Guilbeault said.
“How we adapt depends on where we are in the country. So the actions we take will often be at the local and regional levels,” the minister added.
“While this is the first national adaptation strategy, many communities, governments, businesses, nations have already developed their own adaptation plan to prepare for the risks that a changing climate will bring. I commend your leadership and your foresight.”
In a statement, Keith Stewart, a climate and energy campaigner with Greenpeace Canada, said recent events have made Canada’s need to adapt to climate change “brutally clear”.
“The more that all levels of government work together to fully implement this strategy,” he said, “the more lives and livelihoods that will be saved.”
Tropical forests destroyed last year released 2.7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, equivalent to the fossil fuel emissions of India – the world’s most populous nation.
The world lost an area of old-growth tropical rainforest the size of Switzerland last year as relentless deforestation continues despite promises to protect carbon sinks to combat climate change.
Despite a recent global pledge to reach zero deforestation by 2030, tropical forest loss last year exceeded 2021 levels, said a report by Global Forest Watch, part of the non-profit World Resources Institute (WRI).
About 41,000sq km (15,800sq miles) of tropical rainforest was lost last year, most of it destroyed to make way for cattle and commodity crops, the analysis said on Tuesday.
It noted that the leaders of 145 countries vowed at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow to halt and reverse forest loss by the end of the decade. However, “instead of consistent declines in primary forest loss to meet that goal, the trend is moving in the wrong direction”.
The Global Forest Watch analysis found deforestation in 2022 was more than 10,000sq km (3,900sq miles) in excess of what is needed to halt it entirely by 2030.
That is nearly a football pitch of mature tropical trees felled or burned every five seconds, night and day, and 10 percent more than the year before.
Gutted environmental policies
Tropical forests destroyed last year released 2.7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, equivalent to the fossil fuel emissions of India – the world’s most populous nation.
Brazil accounted for 43 percent of the loss,with Democratic Republic of the Congo and Bolivia responsible for about 13 and nine percent, respectively.
“[The] 2022 numbers are particularly disheartening. We had hoped by now to see a signal in the data that we were turning the corner on forest loss,” said Francis Seymour, a WRI official.
Deforestation in Brazil surged during the four-year rule of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, and increased 15 percent last year compared to 2021.
Bolsonaro’s administration gutted environmental policies, turned a blind eye to illegal deforestation, and weakened protections of the rights of Indigenous peoples proven to be effective stewards of healthy forests.
Scientists fear climate change and deforestation combined could trigger the accelerating transition of the Amazon basin from tropical forest to savannah, which could profoundly disrupt weather not just in South America but across the globe.
Some 90 billion tonnes of CO2 is stored in the Amazon basin’s forest, twice the worldwide annual emissions from all sources.
The world experienced relentless loss of tropical forests in 2022, with tropical primary forests losing 11 football fields ⚽ of forest per minute.
— Global Forest Watch (@globalforests) June 27, 2023
Some positive news in the report found Indonesia and Malaysia managed to keep forest loss near a record low, continuing a multiyear streak of stamping down deforestation driven by oil palm plantations.
Strict Indonesian policies – such as a moratorium on new licences in primary forest and peatland – helped the turnabout.
Globally, vegetation and soil have consistently absorbed about 30 percent of CO2 pollution since 1960, even as those emissions increased by half.
“We are rapidly losing one of our most effective tools for combating climate change, protecting biodiversity, and supporting the health and livelihoods of millions of people,” said Mikaela Weisse, director of Global Forest Watch.
Financing for clean energy in developing and emerging economies, excluding China, must increase seven-fold within a decade if global warming is to be capped at tolerable levels, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says.
To keep temperatures from rising to catastrophic levels, annual investments in non-fossil fuel energy in these Global South countries will need to jump from $260bn to nearly $2 trillion, the intergovernmental agency said in a report on Wednesday.
“Financing clean energy in the emerging and developing world is the fault line of reaching international climate goals,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol told journalists.
The report was released on the eve of the two-day Summit for a New Global Financing Pact in Paris, which seeks to galvanise support for revamping the mid-20th century architecture governing financial flows from rich to developing nations.
G20 nations are historically responsible for 80 percent of global carbon emissions, which are wreaking havoc on the Earth’s climate.
“Many vulnerable, lower-income states have been overwhelmed by economic shocks, debts they cannot pay, and the effects of climate change – a crisis to which they contributed very little, but which is costing people in these countries dearly,” Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, said in a statement.
“These are unprecedented challenges that require a rethink of how the world’s financial architecture is set up.”
Private investment
Speeding the transition from dirty to clean energy and helping the Global South cope with and prepare for devastating climate impacts are high on the summit agenda.
Nearly 800 million people lack electricity and 2.4 billion have no access to clean cooking fuels, most of whom reside in poor and emerging countries.
Under current policy trends, one-third of the rise in energy use in these nations over the next decade will be met by burning fossil fuels, the main driver of global warming, the IEA warned.
According to Birol, investments in clean energy are increasing, but “the bad news is that more than 90 percent of that increase in clean energy since the Paris Agreement in 2015 comes from advanced economies and China.”
To unlock the potential for clean energy in emerging and developing economies, the report emphasized the need for greater international technical, regulatory and financial support.
Based on the IEA’s report, two-thirds of the financing for clean energy projects in emerging and developing economies excluding China “will need to come from the private sector” because public sector investments are “insufficient to deliver universal access to energy and tackle climate change”.
🗣”The investment needs go well beyond the capacity of public financing alone, making it urgent to rapidly scale up much greater private financing for clean energy projects in emerging & developing economies”
With China included in the calculation, private and public money pouring into renewables and other forms of carbon-neutral energy will need to more than triple from $770bn in 2022 to $2.5 trillion per year by the early 2030s.
Within the next decade, today’s $135bn in annual private financing for clean energy in these economies must rise to about $1 trillion a year.
Solar energy: Leading alternative
According to the IEA report, there is potential for rapidly ramping up renewable energy. Solar power is now the cheapest source of electricity generation across almost the entire world.
At least 40 percent of the global solar radiation reaching the planet lands on sub-Saharan Africa, and yet nearly 10 times more solar capacity was installed in China last year than across the entire African continent.
Sunny sub-Saharan Africa generates less solar electricity than the Netherlands, Birol noted.
Amnesty raised the issue that lower income countries “cannot fairly phase out fossil fuels, protect people from the harms of the climate crisis and provide remedy to those most affected”, especially when wealthier countries “continue to evade their obligations of international cooperation and assistance”.
The summit in Paris on Thursday should work to ensure wealthier nations “commit to comprehensive debt relief for lower-income nations” and “honour previous financial pledges they have failed to meet” in previous climate relief pacts, Amnesty said.
“This summit should offer a chance for global leaders to protect the rights of the world’s most marginalized people – not move the burden further onto those who are suffering the most but contributed the least to causing this crisis,” its statement added.
The world needs to phase out fossil fuels if it wants to curb devastating global warming, the United Nations climate chief says, but the idea might not even make it onto the agenda of “make-or-break” negotiations.
The phase-out of heat-trapping fossil fuels “is something that is at top of every discussion or most discussions that are taking place”, UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said.
“It is an issue that has global attention. How that translates into an agenda item and a [climate talks] outcome – we will see.”
Stiell said he could not quite promise ending the use of coal, oil, and natural gas would get a spot on the agenda in climate talks, called COP28, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, later this year.
That agenda decision is up to the president of the negotiations – Sultan Al Jaber, head of the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company – Stiell said.
The decision by the host nation UAE to make Al Jaber the head of the climate conference has drawn fierce opposition from lawmakers in Europe and the United States, as well as environmental advocates. UAE officials said they want game-changing results in the climate talks and note Al Jaber also runs a large renewable energy company.
Last year at climate talks, a proposal by India to phase out all fossil fuels, supported by the US and many European nations, never got on the agenda. What gets discussed is decided by the COP president, who last year was the foreign minister of Egypt, a natural gas exporting nation.
When asked if Egypt’s leaders kept the concept off the agenda, Stiell, speaking via Zoom from Bonn, Germany, where preliminary talks started on Monday, said he could not comment except to say “it’s within their purview”.
‘Game-changing results’
An engineer-turned-government-official and diplomat, Stiell walked a fine line between talking about the importance of a fossil fuel phase-out and supporting the UN process that has put countries that export oil and natural gas in charge of negotiations about global warming for two consecutive years.
About 94 percent of the heat-trapping carbon dioxide that human industrial activity put in the air last year was from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, according to the scientists who monitor emissions at Global Carbon Project.
Al Jaber’s company has the capacity to produce 2 million barrels of oil and 7 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day, and said it plans to increase that drilling to 5 million barrels a day by 2027.
Getting a fossil fuel phase out on the agenda this year depends on the conference president Al Jaber, and on whether there is enough pressure from other nations, Stiell said.
“Where better to have a discussion … then in a region where fossil fuels are at the centre of their economy?” Stiell asked.
A senior UAE official said the Gulf nation wants the UN climate summit it’s hosting from November 30-December 12 to deliver “game-changing results”.
“Our leadership have been very clear to me and our team and our president that they don’t want just another COP that’s incremental,” said Majid al-Suwaidi, who as director-general of the summit plays a key role in the diplomatic negotiations.
“They want a COP that is going to deliver real, big, game-changing results because they see, just like all of us, that we’re not on track to achieve the goals of [the] Paris [Agreement].”
Phasing out ’emissions’
The issue of a coal, oil and natural gas phase-out is central to the fight against climate change, but the real issue is getting something done, not putting it on the COP28 agenda, Stiell said.
In public appearances, Al Jaber has emphasised being “laser-focused on phasing out fossil fuel emissions,” not necessarily the fuels themselves, by promoting carbon capture and removal of the pollutant from the air.
Stiell dismissed the idea that carbon removal can be a short-term solution.
“Right now, in this critical decade of action to achieve those deep reductions, the science tells us it can only be achieved through the reduced use, significantly reduced use, of all fossil fuels,” he said.
Stiell defended the back-to-back years of having climate negotiations run in and by fossil fuel-exporting nations as the wishes of the “parties” or countries involved.
This year will be critical because it is the first global stocktake to see where the world is in its efforts to reduce carbon emissions. To reach the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, greenhouse gas pollution needs to be cut in half by 2030.
“We know we are a long way from where we need to be,” Stiell said.
This year’s conference sets up a new round of pledges for even tighter emissions cuts by telling nations the stark truth of how bad the situation is, Stiell said.
But ignorance of the dire threat to the planet is not the problem, he added.
“It’s lack of implementation, I don’t believe it is the lack of knowledge. There’s been report after report after report that all say the same thing, all with increasing urgency,” Stiell said.
As the world scrambles to address climate change and build resilience to prepare communities for its destructive impacts, nature-based solutions are being presented as a panacea. These projects, which leverage nature and natural processes to help alleviate the effects of climate change and harmful human activity, are increasing in number and scale.
In the Philippines and India, mangrove forests are being expanded in conjunction with existing breakwaters on coastlines to protect against storms and flooding. Similarly, in South Africa, wetlands are being restored to recharge groundwater and protect from drought water-insecure cities, like Cape Town.
Communities globally are encouraged to scale up nature-based solutions and integrate them into modern infrastructure. A 2021 report published by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) concluded that such an approach could save the world $248bn annually in construction costs for expanding infrastructure.
Governments around the world are investing in research and development of nature-based solutions, while global financial institutions such as the World Bank are actively involved in funding projects utilising such approaches.
As urban planning scholars studying water, urbanisation, and climate justice in small and medium-sized South Asian cities, we agree that nature-based solutions hold promise. But we also suggest caution. Our work in Khulna, a region in southern Bangladesh facing multiple ecological crises, provides one example of how integrating nature-based solutions can lead to complicated outcomes that help some communities while harming others.
Khulna’s ‘nature-based solution’
In 2011, Khulna, Bangladesh’s third-largest city, was facing severe water scarcity. Along with declining groundwater and pollution, there was rising saltwater intrusion into its freshwater sources. The local government had several options to address the crisis.
It could build a desalination plant to treat water from nearby rivers. But such installations are known to be ecologically harmful. For example, a paper from the Canadian-based Institute for Water, Environment, and Health notes that desalination plants discharge 142 million cubic metres of hypersaline brine every day globally. That is enough to cover the US state of Florida under 30cm (12 inches) of brine, which can be toxic and incredibly harmful to marine life.
Another option the local government had was implementing tougher water controls on residents and businesses. This would mean asking residents to conserve water and industries to drop water-intensive practices and invest in rainwater harvesting systems. Such water conservation policies can be hard to implement and politically unpopular.
To avoid the negative effects of a desalination plant and potentially unpopular water conservation policies, the local government opted to construct a “climate-proof” water supply system for which it managed to obtain foreign funding from the Asian Development Bank and the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA).
This water supply system was planned to extract water from the Madhumati River in the village of Mollahat, 40km (25 miles) northeast of Khulna, and bring it to the city. During the rainy season, water would be processed directly by a water treatment plant and then provided to consumers. During the dry season, when the salinity of the Madhumati is high, the water would be mixed with low-salt water collected in a reservoir during the rainy season to decrease its salt concentration before being sent to the plant.
Policymakers hoped this “nature-based solution” of mixing water would address future problems as rising seas will continue to increase salinity levels in Khulna’s water. The framing of the new water infrastructure as climate- and nature-friendly enabled the local government to justify the construction of the expensive project.
The new water infrastructure, which was finished in 2019, indeed benefitted Khulna residents. It increased access to piped water from 23 percent of households to 65 percent and provided water access to some informal settlements that did not have any previously.
The problem the ‘solution’ created
The popularity of the new water system in Khulna was apparent in the interviews we conducted with the city’s residents. They reported that women could now get water from taps at assigned times instead of queueing up for hours to collect water from tube wells.
However, the reports from Mollahat were completely different. During our fieldwork in 2018, one of us spoke to a local resident, Mohammad Liton, who said he barely slept through that year. Liton was overcome by worry about the rising salinity and low water levels in the Madhumati River, which had begun to impact his livelihood. Liton argued that the Khulna water project had reduced the availability of water for fishing and rice cultivation in the Mollahat area.
In January 2017, Liton and other residents of Mollahat staged a protest against the project, which was impacting the lives of thousands of farmers and fisherfolk living in the village, but the authorities did not address their concerns.
The project’s environmental impacts statement, which was required by the government of Bangladesh and the foreign donors and which was completed in 2011, focused narrowly on the water site and accounted for construction as the only impact on Mollahat.
According to representatives of the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association (BELA) we interviewed, the scale of the assessment inaccurately accounted for the Madhumati River watershed as existing only in Bangladesh. The river is a tributary in the complex Ganges River system, with flows coming from the Ganges in neighbouring India.
The Madhumati River has been heavily affected by the upstream construction of the controversial Farakka Dam in India’s state of West Bengal, which diverts its waters. The dam has made the river watershed much more sensitive temporally and ecologically and thus, the additional burden of drawing water for the Khulna project has significantly strained the river resources and affected Mollahat and other communities along its basin.
Approaching nature-based solutions with caution
Khulna’s water project should be a cautionary tale – one that can teach policymakers lessons about what they should and should not do when implementing nature-based solutions.
In this case, while industries and households of Khulna reaped the benefits of the projects, residents of Mollahat bore the costs. This could have been avoided if the local authorities had consulted with village dwellers at the construction site and downstream while evaluating the impact of the project. Their feedback could have been used to adjust implementation.
The local authorities should have also aimed to distribute benefits equally among the population of the city and the nearby rural communities. For example, they could have asked industries to conserve water, which would have decreased the strain on the Madhumati River and significantly lessened the impact on the Mollahat community.
When green approaches are combined with infrastructure, local authorities must ensure that no harm is done to adjacent communities. Fixing the water problem of a city should not come at the cost of the devastation of rural communities.
As nature-based solutions are scaled up, we urge policymakers, donors, and communities to be more cautious. Infrastructure projects, like the one in Khulna, must minimise harmful impacts and help tackle inequalities at the local level and across regions.
The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Alessandra Korap is one of six recipients of the 2023 Goldman Environmental Prize for grassroots activism.
When Alessandra Korap was born in the mid-1980s, her Indigenous village, nestled in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, was a haven of seclusion. But as she grew up, the nearby city of Itaituba crept closer and closer, with its bustling streets and commercial activity.
The influx posed a grave threat to Korap’s Munduruku people, 14,000 strong and spread throughout the Tapajos River Basin in Brazil’s Para and Mato Grosso states.
Soon illegal mining, hydroelectric dams, a major railway and river ports for soybean exports choked their lands — lands they were still struggling to have recognised.
Korap and other Munduruku women took up the responsibility of defending their people, overturning the traditionally all-male leadership. Organising in their communities, they orchestrated demonstrations and presented evidence of environmental crime to Brazil’s attorney general and federal police.
And they vehemently opposed illicit agreements and incentives offered to the Munduruku by unscrupulous miners, loggers, corporations and politicians seeking access to their land.
Korap’s defence of her ancestral territory was recognised with the Goldman Environmental Prize on Monday. The award honours grassroots activists around the world who are dedicated to protecting the environment and promoting sustainability.
Korap received the Goldman Environmental Prize in San Francisco, California, for her work in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest [Eric Risberg/AP Photo]
“This award is an opportunity to draw attention to the demarcation of the Sawre Muybu territory,” Korap told The Associated Press news agency. “It is our top priority, along with the expulsion of illegal miners.”
Sawre Muybu is an area of virgin rainforest along the Tapajos River spanning 178,000 hectares (440,000 acres). Official recognition for the land, or demarcation, began in 2007 but was frozen during the far-right presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, which ended in January.
Still, the Munduruku people celebrated a victory in 2021 when the British mining company Anglo American gave up trying to mine inside Indigenous territories in Brazil, including Sawre Muybu.
Studies have shown that Indigenous-controlled forests are the best preserved in the Brazilian Amazon.
Almost half of Brazil’s climate pollution comes from deforestation. The destruction is so vast now that the eastern Amazon, not far from the Munduruku, has ceased to be a carbon sink — a net absorber of the gas.
Instead, it is now a carbon source, according to a study published in 2021 in the journal Nature.
Members of the Indigenous Munduruku community work to expel illegal gold miners from their lands in January 2017 [File: Fabiano Maisonnave/AP Photo]
Korap, however, knows that land rights alone do not protect the land.
In the neighbouring Munduruku Indigenous Territory, illegal miners have destroyed and contaminated hundreds of kilometres of waterways in search of gold, even though it was officially recognised in 2004.
Now Brazil’s new government has created the country’s first Ministry of Indigenous Peoples and, more recently, mounted operations to drive out miners.
She sees his actions as contradictory, noting that while he advocates for forest protection, he also negotiates trade deals with other countries to sell more of the country’s top exports — beef and soybeans — which are the main drivers of deforestation in Brazil.
“When Lula travels abroad, he is sitting with rich people and not with forest defenders. A ministry is useless if the government negotiates our lands without acknowledging we are here,” she said.
Other Goldman Environmental Prize recipients this year are:
Tero Mustonen, a university professor and environmental activist from Finland, who led the purchase of peatland damaged by state-sponsored industrial activity.
Delima Silalahi, a Batak woman from North Sumatra, Indonesia, who organised Indigenous communities across the country to advocate for their rights to traditional forests.
Chilekwa Mumba, a Zambian community organiser who has fought for and won compensation for residents harmed by copper mining before the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court.
Zafer Kizilkaya of Turkey, a marine conservationist and conservation photographer who established Turkey’s first community-managed marine protected area in the Mediterranean.
Diane Wilson, an American shrimp boat captain who won a landmark case against petrochemical giant Formosa Plastics over the discharge of plastic waste on the Texas Gulf Coast in the United States.
Sea level rises double, and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere hit a record, World Meteorological Organization warns.
Record levels of greenhouse gases have caused “planetary scale changes on land, in the ocean and in the atmosphere”, a UN agency says in a report that shows the past eight years were the hottest ever recorded on Earth.
Global sea levels are rising at more than double the pace they did in the first decade of measurements from 1993 to 2002 and touched a new record high last year, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Friday in its State of Global Climate 2022 report.
Extreme glacier melt and record ocean heat levels, which cause water to expand, contributed to an average rise in sea levels of 4.62mm a year from 2013 to 2022, the organisation said in a report detailing the havoc wrought by climate change.
“Melting of glaciers and sea level rise – which again reached record levels in 2022 – will continue to up to thousands of years,” the report said. “Antarctic sea ice fell to its lowest extent on record and the melting of some European glaciers was, literally, off the charts.”
Killer floods, droughts and heat waves occurred around the world, costing many billions of dollars. The amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and methane in the air reached the highest amounts recorded in modern times.
“This report shows that, once again, greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere continue to reach record levels – contributing to warming of the land and ocean, melting of ice sheets and glaciers, rising sea levels, and warming and acidifying of oceans,” WMO Secretary General Petteri Taalas wrote in the report’s foreword.
Overall, the WMO said, 2022 ranked as the fifth or sixth warmest year on record with the mean global temperature 1.15 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average despite the cooling impact of a three-year La Niña climate event in the Pacific Ocean.
Climate scientists have warned that the world could breach a new average temperature record in 2023 or 2024, fuelled by climate change and the anticipated return of warming El Niño conditions.
Record-breaking
The past eight years are the hottest on record globally, the report said.
The United Kingdom, France, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and New Zealand had their hottest years on record.
“In 2022, continuous drought in East Africa, record-breaking rainfall in Pakistan, and record-breaking heat waves in China and Europe affected tens of millions, drove food insecurity, boosted mass migration, and cost billions of dollars in loss and damage,” Taalas wrote.
China’s heatwave was its longest and most extensive on record with its summer not just the hottest but also smashing the old record by more than 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit), the 55-page report said.
Africa’s drought displaced more than 1.7 million people in Somalia and Ethiopia while Pakistan’s devastating flooding, which put one-third of the nation under water at one point, displaced about 8 million people, it said.
In a message ahead of Earth Day on Saturday, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned that “biodiversity is collapsing as one million species teeter on the brink of extinction”. He called on the world to end its “relentless and senseless wars on nature”.
“We have the tools, the knowledge and the solutions” to address climate change, Guterres said.
Port Vila, Vanuatu – Vanuatu is one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world and it is regularly affected by cyclones during the wet season from November to April.
“The cyclone kept changing direction and the winds were coming from different directions,” said Cathy Hivo, recounting the fearful hours as the second of the two cyclones churned across Port Vila, Vanuatu’s capital, on March 3.
“The roofing iron on the house next door tore off and hit one of our windows,” she told Al Jazeera.
Cyclone Judy had just passed over the archipelago on March 1 when Cathy and her husband Ken endured the second bout of extreme weather, battened down inside their home for more than six hours as the strong winds and driving rain of Cyclone Kevin raged from late afternoon until about 11pm.
“It got stronger and stronger,” said Ken Hivo, who is the chief of the Freswota settlements in Port Vila.
“We were told it was a Category 3 cyclone, but it then became Category 4. We have been experiencing stronger cyclones, so we knew what to do,” he said, recounting methods to secure windows and roofs so they do not get ripped off by cyclones.
Not everyone was so fortunate. Many homes could not withstand the cyclonic winds and lost their roofs and walls. Some structures collapsed entirely.
“Thankfully, no lives were lost,” Chief Hivo said, adding that many had lost their homes or sustained storm damage.
While post-cyclone recovery for people in Port Vila will take time, it will be counted in years for the less fortunate residents of the city’s informal settlements like Freswota.
Children at an informal settlement on the outskirts of Port Vila. These precarious communities are located on land vulnerable to climate disasters, such as cyclones and floods [Catherine Wilson/Al Jazeera]
‘Swept out to Sea’
It takes a ride in a local minibus to reach the sprawling Freswota settlements that are home to more than 12,000 people on the outskirts of Port Vila, and Freswota is just one of more than 20 informal settlements on the outskirts of the capital.
Visiting on a recent morning, the area’s unpaved streets had turned to mud after a heavy downpour of rain.
The rapid growth of informal settlements in Pacific Island cities such as Port Vila has been driven by Islanders drawn to the prospect of jobs and better access to education and public services in capitals and major towns. For decades, the growth of settlements in Vanuatu and other island nations has outpaced the capacities of their governments to respond with urban planning, infrastructure and services.
Settlements have mushroomed — often on flood-prone land where tenure rights are uncertain — and so have unsafe, informal housing and overcrowded living conditions that are particularly vulnerable to the more extreme consequence of climate change.
Residents of Freswota range from those in permanent employment to the jobless, but what they all have in common is their low incomes. The recent pair of cyclones have only added to the residents’ hardships.
Cyclones Judy and Kevin, which hit Port Vila during the first week of March, destroyed homes in the Freswota settlement [Photo courtesy of Cathy Hivo]
There was no power for a week and a half after Cyclone Kevin, and it is still down in some parts of the community.
“You’re looking at houses that have been damaged and some just totally destroyed”, said Soneel Ram, a Pacific country communications manager for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
“The urgent needs here are shelter and clean, safe drinking water, because most of these communities rely on rivers and streams as their water source, but the debris have polluted these water sources,” Ram told Al Jazeera.
The Red Cross has provided tarpaulin to make temporary shelters, and water and hygiene kits, Ram added.
The morning after Cyclone Kevin hit, Chief Hivo recalled, he met with other community leaders to prepare a recovery plan and to organise residents, including young people, to start the cleanup and assess local needs.
“We depend on our local foods. People usually have market stalls selling fresh produce on the sides of the roads in the settlement. But now there isn’t much food to sell,” he said.
“The most vulnerable people in the settlements when we have a cyclone are the elderly, those in poor health or with medical conditions and people who are without relatives here to support them,” Hivo said.
“But we share everything together, we help each other,” he added.
Chief Ken Hivo witnessed the path of destruction wrought by Cyclones Judy and Kevin in the informal Freswota settlement of Port Vila, Vanuatu [Catherine Wilson/Al Jazeera]
Two cyclones, one earthquake, and a tsunami warning
The severe winds and torrential rain unleashed by the cyclones also destroyed crops and household food gardens throughout the country.
More than 80 percent of Vanuatu’s population of about 320,000 people were affected by the back-to-back cyclones, and Shefa province, which includes the coastal city of Port Vila on Efate Island, was one of the worst-affected areas.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said there was widespread destruction of homes, buildings, food gardens, as well as water, power and telecommunication services.
While official assessments of the scale of the loss and damage throughout the islands are still being finalised, a UN spokesperson told Al Jazeera that rebuilding homes could take anywhere from a few months to several years.
Restoration of major infrastructure could take more than three years, according to the UN, and the recovery bill is initially estimated at about $50m.
Map of Vanuatu (Al Jazeera)
Located in the tropical Pacific, Vanuatu experiences about two to three cyclones per year. Also located within the ‘Pacific Ring of Fire’ of seismic activity, Vanuatu faces a high risk of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis.
And as Cyclone Kevin was wreaking havoc in Port Vila earlier this month, a magnitude 6.5 earthquake shook Vanuatu’s Espiritu Santo island in the north of the archipelago.
For small island developing states, climate change is the single most significant threat to sustainable development. Now, three weeks after the dual natural disasters, the Vanuatu Government is pushing to achieve climate justice at the UN.
Vanuatu hopes the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) will this week adopt its push for greater priority to be given to the human rights implications of changing climates and for the International Court of Justice to protect vulnerable nations from climate change.
Vanuatu’s Minister of Climate Change, Ralph Regenvanu, reported that 119 governments have cosponsored Vanuatu’s UN resolution, which seeks clarity on the legal obligation of states to tackle climate change action, according to the Reuters news agency.
Vanuatu hopes more nations will sign on to the resolution before the UNGA debate begins this week and a vote on the resolution takes place.
While the post-disaster clean up and restoration in the central business district of Port Vila has paved the way for the resumption of public transport, services and business, it will be a far longer road to recovery for the people living precariously in settlements such as Freswota.
“There are people here who have not recovered from Cyclone Pam,” Chief Hivo said, referring to the cyclone that hit in 2015.
“It will take longer for the most vulnerable people,” he adds.
Australian climate campaigner Deanna ‘Violet’ CoCo found herself facing a 15-month prison sentence after she and three other activists drove a truck onto Sydney Harbour Bridge last April and blocked one of its lanes during the morning rush hour.
The group lit orange flares and livestreamed their protest leading to gridlock in Australia’s largest city. After about 25 minutes, the police arrived and arrested them.
CoCo and her fellow activists were charged under the Roads and Crimes Amendment Act, passed only days before in response to similar previous protests and created new criminal penalties for any damage or disruption to major roads.
CoCo, who told Al Jazeera she staged the protest to highlight “climate breakdown”, was initially found guilty and given a 15-month jail term (the law allows a maximum of two years). But after the 32-year-old appealed, the verdict was overturned.
A police report claiming the protest had obstructed an ambulance was found to have been falsified.
“[New South Wales police] went to quite a lot of detail to stress this ambulance had been blocked,” CoCo told Al Jazeera.
“It wasn’t just in the fact sheet that there may have been an ambulance. There was a whole sentence describing this ambulance that had lights and sirens on. It was a huge aggravating factor in not just my sentencing, but my intense bail conditions.”
Along with three days in a cell on remand, CoCo was placed under 24-hour curfew for 20 days, with a further 126 days of restricted movement. District Court Judge Mark Williams, who overturned the sentence, described her bail conditions as ‘quasi-custody.’
Australia is not the only liberal democracy where civil liberties and other political freedoms are under threat from ever more draconian laws introduced by governments that have struggled to deal with new forms of protests.
Pioneered by groups like Extinction Rebellion, small groups of protesters have taken increasingly radical approaches to draw attention to their causes — from blocking roads like CoCo did, to sit-downs and defacing artworks.
The Sydney Harbour Bridge is one of the city’s main thoroughfares and Deanna CoCo was accused of creating traffic gridlock by blocking one of its lanes during the morning rush hour [File: Saeed Khan/AFP]
CoCo says part of her protest was to challenge the state-based legislation, which had been passed in New South Wales just four days before she drove onto the Harbour Bridge.
“Many Australians didn’t know that these laws had been brought into effect. And so as much as this protest was about climate and climate breakdown, it was very much also about exposing these laws and challenging them.”
In the late 1800s, women held protests to demand the right to vote, while public action against the Vietnam War attracted thousands of people in the late 1960s.
More recently, Australia’s Indigenous communities have used the power of protest to raise the issue of Aboriginal deaths in custody, attracting tens of thousands of people every year. Climate change action — including public disruption and protests at mining and logging sites — has also continued.
New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet, however, insists draconian laws are necessary for the authorities to cope with the new types of protest.
“There’s no place in our state for that type of behaviour,” he told reporters after the court overturned Coco’s jail term. “If you want to protest in NSW, you’re free to protest. But when you protest, you do not inconvenience people across NSW.”
Critics say the laws are not really about protecting residents from “inconvenience” but protecting state governments’ close economic ties with extractive industries, such as mining, logging and coal seam gas. The states of Queensland and Tasmania have also toughened laws on protest.
The Australia Institute — a public policy think tank — released a report in 2021 demonstrating that state and federal governments provided 10.3 billion Australian dollars ($6.9bn) in subsidies to major fossil fuel users, the equivalent of nearly 20,000 Australian dollars ($13,405) per minute.
“Coal, oil and gas companies in Australia give the impression that they are major contributors to the Australian economy, but our research shows that they are major recipients of government funds,” said Rod Campbell, research director at The Australia Institute.
“From a climate perspective this is inexcusable and from an economic perspective it is irresponsible.”
Like many liberal democracies, Australia has a long history of protest, but governments are introducing new legislation limiting that right [File: Peter Parks/AFP]
Greens Senator David Shoebridge told Al Jazeera that “state governments are so close to the extractive industries that they’re protecting through these anti-protest scores, the logging industry, the mining industry, the fossil fuels industries.”
“We have seen them, literally passing the laws that those industries want,” he said.
Shoebridge plans to introduce a bill at the federal level which will protect the right to protest and rebalance state-introduced legislation — such as the New South Wales law which saw CoCo arrested — around protest.
“Those are laws that have gone well beyond the traditional legal sanctions for people engaging in disruptive but not violent protest,” he told Al Jazeera.
“The hope is that at a federal level, there’s more political distance from those industries. That’s why we’re progressing with drafting a proposed bill to protect the right of protest.”
Anti-protest
The crackdown on protests in Australia mirrors similar moves in countries such as the United Kingdom, where a bill was introduced at the end of 2022 to make ‘locking on’ style protests a criminal offence, and another introduced to restrict strike action.
The CIVICUS Monitor, which tracks the democratic and civic health of countries across the world, recently downgraded the UK’s status to ‘obstructed’, placing it alongside countries including Hungary and South Africa.
“The government’s interference with protests and negative attitudes towards civil society have serious and troubling implications for its liberal democracy standards and human rights norms,” it said, adding that the government was increasingly hostile towards those speaking out against its policies in areas such as climate change and refugees.
The rights group also downgraded Australia to ‘narrowed’, citing “a deterioration in fundamental freedoms due to concerns around freedom of the press, the targeting of whistle-blowers, anti-protest laws and increased surveillance”.
Piero Moraro, a criminologist at Edith Cowan University, told Al Jazeera that the rapid erosion of civil liberties was concerning.
He told Al Jazeera that Australia’s anti-protest laws were “passed extremely quickly in parliament”.
“I think this is not coincidental,” he said. “I think it’s because the climate change movement has stepped up. And as a response, the anti-protest legislation has stepped up as well.”
He said that threats of prison time and hefty fines were implemented as a deterrent to protest.
“The goal is to deter because they don’t want people to protest,” he said. “There is a deep danger that many human rights and civil society organisations are highlighting that these will eventually undermine the right to protest altogether.”
CoCo’s appeal against her conviction also raised questions about the police handling of such cases.
Police had originally asserted that the protest had presented an “imposition to a critical emergency service [which had] the potential to result in fatality,” while the sentencing magistrate had stressed the fact that the protesters had “halted an ambulance under lights and siren” as part of the justification for imposing a more severe sentence.
Politicians point to more radical action by groups like Extinction Rebellion to justify their crackdown on rights [File: Matt Hrkac/Extinction Rebellion via AFP]
At the appeal, however, the presiding magistrate noted that the police had falsified the facts and that there had been no ambulance.
CoCo was given a 12-month conditional release which she described as “basically a good behaviour bond”. While the conditions of her release do not prevent her from engaging in ‘lawful’ protest, she would breach the conditions with an action such as blocking the Harbour Bridge — an illegal act under the new legislation.
While the New South Wales Police Force would not comment on the specifics of the case, they told Al Jazeera that they recognised and supported “the rights of individuals and groups to exercise their rights of free speech and lawful assembly in a safe environment”. The force added that it had facilitated “hundreds of lawful protests every year” and would continue to do so.
“That includes working with protest organisers and community groups before — and during — protests to ensure their right to protest in a lawful and peaceful manner is met, and public safety is maintained with minimal danger or disruption to the wider community.”
Certainly, the new laws have not deterred Coco.
She says the issue of ‘climate breakdown’ was simply too big to be ignored.
“They can sentence me to 1,000 years in prison, and that will not be more terrifying than thinking about every single person that I love facing climate breakdown,” she said.
UAE’s COP president says oil-and-gas industry must take charge of the battle against planetary warming.
The oil-and-gas industry must lead the fight against climate change, the president of this year’s United Nations climate talks says.
Addressing hundreds of oil-and-gas executives at the CERAWeek conference in Houston, Texas, on Monday, Sultan al-Jaber, said, “No one can be on the sidelines and this industry, in particular, is integral to developing the solutions.
“In fact, this industry must take responsibility and lead the way,” al-Jaber, who is also the minister of industry of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and chief executive of its Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, said.
Climate activists have criticised the decision to hold the Conference of the Parties (COP28) in the UAE, a major oil producer, and also the choice of al-Jaber as the meeting’s president.
The last UN climate talks in Egypt in November ended with a landmark deal to create a fund to cover the costs that developing countries face from climate-linked natural disasters.
But observers were left disappointed that little progress was made on reducing planet-heating carbon emissions from fossil fuels.
Al-Jaber, who has taken part in more than 10 COP meetings, headed the UAE’s delegation in Egypt. It was by far the biggest delegation to attend the talks, and one of the largest in COP history.
The UAE, one of the world’s biggest oil producers, argues that crude remains indispensable to the global economy and is needed to finance the energy transition.
The Gulf monarchy is pushing the merits of carbon capture – removing carbon dioxide as fuel is burned or from the atmosphere.
But the technology is in its infancy and many challenges lay ahead. The amount of greenhouse gasses captured must rocket to 800 million tonnes in 2030 from about 40 million tonnes today.
As much as $160bn needs to be invested in the technology by 2030, a 10-fold increase from the previous 10 years, according to the International Energy Agency.
Rising concentrations of atmospheric emissions are forcing up global temperatures and intensifying droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events, all while causing severe damage to ecosystems that underpin life on Earth.
The European Union plans to halt the sale of fossil fuel cars by 2035 and wants to speed up the switch to electric vehicles.
The manufacture of fossil fuel-powered cars employs millions of people across Europe. But the vehicles account for 15 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions in the European Union.
The EU wants to drastically reduce exhaust fumes as part of its ambitious plans to reach carbon neutrality by 2050 and combat climate change. Petrolheads are now being told to prepare for a cleaner ride.
Carmakers will be required to cut 100 percent of carbon emissions in new vehicles sold in the EU by 2035.
Elsewhere, profits of global airlines are taking off for the first time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Taipei, Taiwan – At opposite ends of Southeast Asia, researchers Pornampai Narenpitak and Heri Kuswanto are both working on the same problem: Is it possible to mimic the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions to halt global warming?
Using computer modelling and analysis, Narenpitak and Kuswanto are separately studying whether shooting large quantities of sulphur dioxide into the earth’s stratosphere could have a similar effect on global temperatures as the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora in 1815.
The eruption, the most powerful in recorded history, spewed an estimated 150 cubic kilometres (150,000 gigalitres) of exploded rock and ash into the air, causing global temperatures to fall as much as 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) in what became known as the “year without a summer”.
Stratospheric aerosol injection is among a number of nascent – and controversial – technologies in the field of solar geoengineering (SRM) that have been touted as potential solutions to mitigating the effects of climate change.
Other proposed strategies include brightening marine clouds to reflect the sun or breaking up cirrus clouds that capture heat.
SRM is largely untested in the real world.
But in Asia, where many countries are juggling the demands of trying to keep the lights on despite outdated power infrastructure and striving for carbon neutrality, the concept is at the centre of a growing body of academic discussion and research.
Stratospheric aerosol injection is among the nascent technologies that some scientists believe could be used to migrate climate change [Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]
Narenpita and Kuswanto, who are studying the use of the technology in their respective home countries of Thailand and Indonesia, believe that SRM at the very least merits further study.
“There’s a lot that we do not understand about the climate system itself, let alone SRM,” Narenpitak, a researcher at the National Science and Technology Development Agency in Bangkok, told Al Jazeera.
“And when I say ‘we’, I think it means everyone, from every region in the world, because eventually, the impacts will look differently for different countries. And to assess the impacts, I think it’s best to have people who understand the context of each country to do the analysis. We can’t make any informed decisions if we do not know about these things.”
Take Indonesia.
Kuswanto’s team at the Sepuluh Nopember Institute of Technology in Surabaya, East Java found that while SRM could have positive effects in some parts of the country such as Sumatra and Kalimantan, it would lead to temperature rises elsewhere.
“Unfortunately, we haven’t yet done any more studies about what is the cause of these different results in Indonesia, but of course to improve it, we have to look at the climate systems and we need to study it more,” Kuswanto told Al Jazeera.
The two scientists, whose work is funded by the Degrees Initiative, an NGO focused on furthering SRM research and discussion in developing countries with funding from San Francisco-based Open Philanthropy, are neutral on whether SRM should be used to offset the effects of climate change, but they do share a sentiment shared by many researchers: it is better to know how the technology works, just in case.
Both are also careful to say that SRM is not an alternative or substitute for cutting carbon emissions, but should be seen as more of a supplemental technology.
“Even after we reduce carbon emissions, it takes several years for the carbon that has already been emitted into the atmosphere to be removed – its warming effect is still there,” Narenpitak said.
“There’s a time lag between when we can significantly reduce carbon emissions and when we will see the temperature stop rising. In that sense, SRM may be able to bring down the temperature.”
[Al Jazeera]
Climate scientists say that the world must keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5C (2.7F) to avoid some of the worst projected effects of climate change. Achieving that goal, however, appears to be increasingly unlikely.
In October, Simon Stiell, executive secretary of UN Climate Change, warned that countries’ decarbonisation efforts were still “nowhere near the scale and pace of emission reductions required” to meet the 1.5C target.
Whether SRM should even be considered as a solution is still up for debate. The technology was absent from the UN Environment Programme’s 2022 Emissions Gap Report, which included different strategies for climate mitigation.
Much of the major funding for SRM has been concentrated in the United States after a five-year research project by China’s Beijing Normal University, Zhejiang University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences came to an end in 2019, although researchers concluded China should keep pushing towards a global agreement on SRM.
This trend is set to continue after the US 2022 Appropriations Act authorised funding for a five-year project by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to examine how to study SRM on a national scale – setting down goals, concerns, funding needs and which agencies would actually oversee this work.
Testing SRM beyond computer modelling, however, is deeply controversial because of the unknown effects and unpredictability of shooting chemicals into the stratosphere.
Since SRM involves shooting chemicals into the atmosphere 20-30km (12.4-18.6 miles) above the earth’s surface, the deployment of the technology by one country could affect weather patterns in other parts of the world.
[Al Jazeera]
Govindasamy Bala, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science’s Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, found in experiments using computer models that the effects of aerosol injections can vary depending on the latitude at which the injections are carried out.
One climate model predicted, for example, different effects on monsoon rains depending on the hemisphere: aerosols injected at 15 degrees north reduced monsoon rain in the Northern Hemisphere and increased rainfall in the Southern Hemisphere, and vice versa.
Other research has shown different effects on hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean compared with typhoons and cyclones elsewhere.
“I think the only conclusion we have right now is if we do stratospheric aerosol injection, it has the ability to reduce global warming. We know it will work, but it will also have side effects and unequal impacts,” Bala told Al Jazeera.
“If we can do this, it means humans can control the climate, right? We have the ability to control climate but the more difficult question is who will decide?”
Such concerns were among the reasons Sweden’s Space Agency in 2021 cancelled a joint project with Harvard University to carry out a landmark technical test of SRM in the Arctic Circle using a high-altitude balloon following public outcry, most notably from Indigenous Saami people living in the region.
The SCoPEx project had been intended as a dry run for navigating a 600kg (1,323 pounds) payload at more than twice the height of a commercial aircraft.
Some climate activists have also raised concerns about moral hazard, arguing the technology could weaken countries’ commitment to reducing global greenhouse emissions and give companies licence to keep polluting.
Meanwhile, there are outstanding questions about how the technology would be regulated given the global implications of unilateral action, especially by large countries such as the United States and China.
Climate change expert Dhanasree Jayaram says there are concerns solar geoengineering could divert attention and funding away from other climate change mitigation measures [Courtesy of Delphi Economic Forum]
“The benefits itself [of SRM] can be questioned in the sense that, do we need this when we have other means like mitigation, which is something that we need to push for at this stage,” Dhanasree Jayaram, a research fellow at Earth System Governance and assistant professor at the Manipal Academy of Higher Education’s Centre for Climate Studies in India, told Al Jazeera.
“Does it actually sideline, for instance, research investments and other resources that need to actually go into mitigation? Is this a distraction from the real requirements of climate governance?”
SRM raises geopolitical questions, as well, Jayaram said, as developing countries struggle with their own energy transitions. They could also feel pressure to join the SRM “bandwagon” to ensure they can still have a seat at the table, she said.
While such questions preoccupy academia, some of SRM’s most enthusiastic champions have emerged in Silicon Valley.
Make Sunsets, a two-person team based between the US and Mexico, is preparing to carry out micro SRM experiments with Amazon-bought weather balloons, helium and small amounts of sulphur dioxide. Their long-term goal is to use the balloons to sell cooling credits to private companies.
“Our theory is basically that companies can only meet their net [carbon] zero goals if they resort to things like our measure, because it’s so much more cost-effective,” Make Sunsets founder Luke Iseman told Al Jazeera.
“We can issue a whole lot of these cooling credits, and we don’t wait around for 20 years to see if these trees grow, we actually put this up into the air and can see an impact within several years.”
Make Sunsets has hit a number of snags since its launch in October 2022.
Only a handful of individuals have bought credits so far, according to Iseman.
More seriously, flights were grounded in Mexico after the government there banned the company from carrying out experiments following a number of balloon launches on the Baja Peninsula, citing potential environmental damage.
Last week, Make Sunsets announced it had carried out the launches of three balloons containing small amounts of sulfur dioxides in the US state of Nevada.
SRM researchers such as John Moore, however, argue that the world needs to get a grasp of how the technology could work as soon as possible, rather than finding out later during a global emergency.
“What people tend to be worried about is that people will, in a sense, panic and go for the geoengineering option, suddenly because some terrible catastrophe due to climate change is happening somewhere. And then people try to launch balloons or spray aerosols into the stratosphere,” Moore, a research professor at the University of Lapland’s Arctic Center in Finland and leader of China’s five-year SRM project, told Al Jazeera.
John Moore believes the world needs to understand solar geoengineering as soon as possible [Courtesy of John Moore]
This is particularly true, Moore said, for the countries that are feeling the harshest effects of climate change despite contributing historically fewer greenhouse gases.
“I know there are some people that are quite high profile that say doing any research on solar geoengineering is bad because of this moral hazard argument, and I completely disagree with that,” he said.
“Fundamentally, I think that we actually have a duty to people in the developing world, that have not contributed to greenhouse gas emissions, who are already suffering disproportionate damage because of climate change impacts.”
Below-normal rainfall is expected during the rainy season over the next three months in parts of Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia, a climate research centre says.
Drought trends in the Horn of Africa are now worse than they were during the 2011 famine in which hundreds of thousands of people died.
The IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Center said on Wednesday that below-normal rainfall is expected during the rainy season over the next three months.
“In parts of Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, and Uganda that have been most affected by the recent drought, this could be the 6th failed consecutive rainfall season,” it said.
Drier than normal conditions have also increased in parts of Burundi, eastern Tanzania, Rwanda and western South Sudan, the centre added.
While famine thresholds have not been reached, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday that 8.3 million people – more than half Somalia’s population – will need humanitarian assistance this year.
Workneh Gebeyehu, the head of IGAD, urged governments and partners to act “before it’s too late”.
The drought, the longest on record in Somalia, has lasted almost three years and tens of thousands of people have died.
Last month, the UN resident coordinator for Somalia warned excess deaths in the country will “almost certainly” surpass those of the famine declared in the country in 2011, when more than 260,000 people died of starvation.
A camel carcass rots in the desert near the village of War Idad in Somalia [File: Scott Peterson/Getty Images]
Ongoing hunger crisis
About 1.3 million people, 80 percent women and children, have been internally displaced in Somalia by the drought sweeping the Horn of Africa. After five consecutive poor rainy seasons, the ongoing drought has already become the longest and most severe in Somalia’s recent history.
Close to 23 million people are thought to be highly food insecure in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya, according to a food security working group chaired by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the regional Intergovernmental Authority on Development.
Already 11 million livestock that are essential to many families’ health and wealth have died, Wednesday’s statement said. Many people affected across the region are pastoralists or farmers who have watched crops wither and water sources run dry.
The war in Ukraine has affected the humanitarian response, as traditional donors in Europe divert funding for the crisis closer to home.
“These prolonged and recurrent climate change-induced droughts will further worsen other existing, mutually exacerbating humanitarian challenges in the region, including the ongoing hunger crisis, the impacts of COVID-19, and internal displacement.
“We need an all-hands-on-deck approach to strengthen food systems, livelihoods, and climate resilience,” said Mohammed Mukhier, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies director for Africa.
Cold temperatures, icy blizzards and strong gusts are expected to sweep through cities like Minneapolis, Minnesota.
A “historic winter storm” is forecasted to dump record snowfall on parts of the midwestern United States this week, with local officials warning of “life-threatening travel conditions” in areas expected to receive blizzard conditions.
“A huge swath of the US is currently being, or will be impacted, by potentially dangerous winter weather,” the National Weather Service wrote on its Twitter page Tuesday, projecting heavy snow, sleet and gusts to last through Thursday. An estimated 40 million Americans could be affected by the three-day blast.
Snow could fall as quickly as 5cm (2 inches) per hour, the agency warned, as it anticipated “treacherous, potentially impossible travel conditions and possible power outages”. Southern Minnesota could receive up to 61cm (2 ft) of fresh powder, it added.
This model reflectivity loop gives a general idea of what we’re expecting for timing of the snow through Thursday. Note that this particular model has some rain with the first wave, but this will be ALL SNOW. We are NOT anticipating any mixed precip! #mnwx#wiwxpic.twitter.com/zgl2s0be69
The storm is expected to break records in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area, located on the state line between Minnesota and Wisconsin. The cluster of cities, which boasts a total of more than 3.5 million residents, could net up to 50.8cm (1.6 ft) of snow, one of its highest totals in history.
“Snowplow crews will be out working statewide, but this storm could be a doozy,” the Minnesota Department of Transportation tweeted on Tuesday. In anticipation of the extreme weather, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey announced the city was “planning to declare a snow emergency on Wednesday”.
Public school buildings in the city have been closed through Friday, with students attending class through online “e-learning” facilities.
The winter storm comes as an Arctic air mass moves south from Canada into the US, combining with two “energetic” fronts and pushing eastward across the Great Plains region towards the Great Lakes, the National Weather Service explained.
Vehicles navigate a snowy downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota, on February 21 [Abbie Parr/AP Photo]
Winds could whip up to 128.7km per hour (80 mph) in some areas. And temperatures could plunge 20 to 30 degrees below average, with the wind chill making some areas feel like -32C (-25F).
The storm is expected to roll through the region in two waves: the first lasting through Wednesday morning and the second, “more impactful” portion arriving Wednesday afternoon and continuing through Thursday.
Already on Tuesday, conditions were worsening in Great Plains states like Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota. The city of Great Falls, Montana, recorded temperatures of -15C (-5F), according to the National Weather Service.
Winter storms are growing in frequency and intensity, experts warn, as climate change supercharges extreme weather events, from droughts to heavy snow.
As the US Midwestest is pummelled by another onslaught of snow, other parts of the country are also experiencing unusual weather events. The National Weather Service in Jacksonville, Florida, along the southeast coast, tweeted on Tuesday that “near record warmth is forecast into early next week”.
And in California’s San Francisco Bay Area, part of the US west coast, back-to-back storms are expected to yield the possibility of light snowfall — something not seen in San Francisco since 1976.
The European Union has drawn up a plan to boost the production of electric cars and renewable energy projects.
The International Energy Agency estimates the global market for mass-produced clean energy will triple to around $650bn a year by 2030.
The world’s biggest economies want a slice of that growing industry.
The United States Congress recently passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes billions of dollars in grants and loans to boost financing and deployment of clean energy projects. But it has sparked a trade dispute with allies in Europe.
Now the European Union has set out its own plan to compete with the US as a production hub for green products.
Elsewhere, we look at why Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is threatening the central bank’s autonomy.
Failure to act on the climate emergency means ‘parts of our planet will be uninhabitable and for many it will be a death sentence’, Antonio Guterres warns.
Some big oil companies ignored their own science on the dangers of climate change and “peddled the big lie” for decades about the safety of burning fossil fuels, the United Nations chief said.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres delivered a sobering message to the elite gathering of world leaders and corporate executives in the Swiss ski resort of Davos.
The world is in a “sorry state” because of myriad interlinked challenges – including climate change and Russia’s war in Ukraine – which are “piling up like cars in a chain reaction crash” amid the “gravest levels of geopolitical division and mistrust in generations”, said Guterres.
He singled out climate change as an “existential challenge” and said a global commitment to limit the Earth’s temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) “is nearly going up in smoke”.
“Every week brings another climate horror story. Greenhouse gases are at record levels and growing. Without action, we are going up to a 2.8C increase and the consequences – as we all know – would be devastating.
“Several parts of our planet will be uninhabitable and for many, it will be a death sentence.”
‘Baking our planet’
Guterres, who has been one of the most outspoken world figures on climate change, referenced a recent study that found scientists at Exxon Mobil made remarkably accurate predictions about the effects of climate change as far back as the 1970s, even as the company publicly doubted global warming was real.
“The science has been clear for decades. I’m not talking only about UN scientists, I’m talking even about fossil fuel scientists,” Guterres said.
“We learned last week that certain fossil fuel producers were fully aware in the 1970s that their core product was baking our planet, and just like the tobacco industry, they rode roughshod over their own science.
“Some in Big Oil peddled the big lie. And like the tobacco industry, those responsible must be held to account.”
As the west coast of the United States withstands its ninth major storm in three weeks, California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed a new executive order to “further bolster the emergency response” as his state contends with widespread flooding and mudslides.
In a statement on Monday, Newsom’s office said that the onslaught of atmospheric rivers — relatively intense, narrow bands of moisture that can bring heavy precipitation and strong gusts — “resulted in at least 20 fatalities and forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of residents”.
The latest executive order comes two days after US President Joe Biden declared the situation in California “a major disaster” and ordered additional federal aid for the waterlogged state.
Cleanup efforts are underway as California continues to endure the effects of the storms, with flood warnings and evacuation orders still in effect for areas including Monterey County, a region famous for its rugged coastline and scenic, cliff-hugging highways.
Lingering showers are expected “through midweek”, according to the governor’s office.
“Even 6 inches [15cm] of fast-moving flood water can knock you off your feet,” the National Weather Service warned on Monday. “And a depth of 2 feet [60cm] will float your car.”
Powerful storms over the weekend flipped a big-rig truck travelling across San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge on Saturday and led to roads buckling and crumbling across the state.
Happening now – @SDLifeguards and copter 2 searching for victims in the SD River near 4700 Pacific Hwy. So far 5 victims out of the water with two more possibly still in. #rescuespic.twitter.com/TAonVkTND1
In San Diego County, close to the state’s border with Mexico, the Los Angeles Times reported that at least nine people were rescued from fast-moving water resulting from the continuous rainfall.
And even as precipitation tapered off on Monday in some parts of the state, loose soil — brittle from a years-long drought and saturated from three straight weeks of rain — continues to pose a threat.
Mudslides forced 10 homes in Berkeley Hills in northern California to be evacuated on Monday morning. And in southern California, more rock, mud and debris poured onto state highways in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, forcing further delays in areas already stalled by collapsing hillsides over the weekend.
Floodwaters from the Russian River rise up around buildings in Guerneville, California, on January 15, 2023 [Fred Greaves/Reuters]
High in the Sierra Nevada mountains that form the state’s eastern rim, the Central Sierra Snow Lab run by the University of California, Berkeley, reports that its research station has received 126cm (49.6 inches) of snow since Friday, with more falling on Monday.
The lab had previously documented that the snowpack around its research centre was approximately 3 metres (10 feet) deep as of Saturday.
The National Weather Service has issued a “winter storm warning” for the mountains through Tuesday, predicting most of the snowfall will happen on Monday.
“Travel will be extremely difficult or impossible. If you plan to travel, consider alternate strategies,” the agency’s bureau in Hanford tweeted.
White-out conditions in the mountains had previously forced the closure of Interstate 80, a major east-west artery, over the weekend. But traffic over the Sierra Nevada resumed on Monday, with cars required to use tyre chains to navigate the snow and ice.
Other roadways remain closed “due to heavy snow [and] avalanche control”, the state transportation authority Caltrans tweeted.
While nearby Santa Cruz and Monterey counties continued to face flood warnings, the city of San Francisco and other municipalities in the north and east of the San Francisco Bay Area started to see drier conditions on Monday after a soggy morning.
The overnight rainfall in San Francisco pushed the total precipitation since October to 516mm (20.3 inches), surpassing the yearly average in a matter of months, according to the National Weather Service.
Federal disaster relief is available for hard-hit counties like Santa Cruz, Sacramento and Merced, where the small agricultural town of Planada was largely submerged by floodwaters.
“All of this was underwater,” local activist Alicia Rodriguez told the Merced Sun-Star newspaper as she made visits to a residential neighbourhood last week. “A resident was telling me it was 4 feet [1.2 metres] in some places.”
Water from the San Diego River submerges a vehicle in San Diego, California, on Monday [Mike Blake/Reuters]
Monday’s executive order from the governor’s office has called for state agencies to waive their fees for residents seeking to replace vital records, like birth certificates, and it provides resources for health care facilities to remain open during the severe weather.
The California National Guard reported on Sunday that its 649th Engineer Company had removed 1,800 cubic yards (1376 cubic metres) of debris from San Ysidro Creek alone, “enough to cover an entire football field in 12 inches [30cm] of debris”.
“And they’re just getting started,” the National Guard said in a tweet.
Meteorologists continue to monitor a developing storm over the Pacific Ocean to see if it will become a 10th atmospheric river. It is expected to make landfall on Wednesday.
